Various ramblings and musings on gardening, agriculture, food and related subjects.

Tuesday, October 2, 2012

Plant hunting issues

Social deviants collecting seed in an unnamed central Asian country

I was at an
interesting event today – curating it in fact. At London's Garden
Museum. A symposium on the future of plant hunting, run as part of the current exhibition. Its something
that several of us have been wanting to hold for years, to thrash out
some difficult issues that have been caused by that most
well-intentioned declaration – the 1992 Rio Convention on
Bio-diversity (CBD).

The Convention has
made the transfer of plants or wild-collected seed from one country
to another technically illegal but set up no mechanism for 'buying'
material. Yet another badly-thought out international agreement, that
once signed, freezes everything in a place where nobody wants to be.
The results have been botanical institutions wanting (and needing) to
do everything by the book, and needing to keep well clear of
non-botanists doing any plant collecting which does not have country
of origin authority. The result is the sundering of the former good
relations that often existed between botanical institutions and the
horticulture community. I wrote about the background in an article in The Telegraph.

I
kicked off saying that at least everyone is talking. The idea of
getting someone from Kew (Tim Entwisle), Prof. James Hitchmough from
Sheffield, Bleddyn and Sue Wynn-Jones fromCrûg Farm Plants (the UK's
leading plant hunters) and maverick nurseryman Michael Wickenden of Cally Gardenstogether on the same platform would have almost unthinkable a few
years ago. It could have been too incendiary. We also had John David,
the acting Head of Science from the Royal Horticultural Society too,
and, a special treat this, Roy Lancaster who gave us a great
historical perspective.

Just
before it began, Christopher Woodward, the Museum Director called me
into his office. I knew he had something important to say. Which was
that the RHS although they had helped the Museum put on and had
refused to help publicise the symposium. Too much beyond their
comfort zone apparently. Too politically sensitive.

The
whole issue of industrialized countries acquiring the genetic
resources of poorer ones is a sensitive one. The absurdity is that
very little money is made by anybody doing so for ornamental or
landscape plants. The world horticulture community is suffering
blow-back from the issues raised by (e.g.) pharmaceutical
multinationals and others engaged in 'bio-piracy' or plant-breeding
companies acquiring crop genes from the global south and then selling
them back to them in new varieties. Post-colonial elites in the south
make a lot of noise, with justification in some cases, but all too
often exploit liberal guilt in the north, resulting in a kind of
defensive paranoia in the botanical community. In any case, the real
damage to plants and habitat in many countries is not coming from
plant hunters taking a few seeds away (depriving a mouse of its lunch
as Michael Wickenden put it in his eloquent, punchy, radical presentation) but
habitat destruction and the plundering of natural resources for
traditional medicine (a lot of which doesn't work anyway).

James
Hitchmough got us going. As articulate and entertaining as ever, he
informed us of how limited the gene pool is for many ornamental
plants, of how climate change is going to mean a lot of re-thinking
about what we plant, of how different urban gardening is from rural
(where most of the garden-designing, garden-writing,
garden-opinion-forming classes live, and needless to say garden). We
need more diverse genetic material amongst our cultivated plants, to
improve the ecological fitness for conditions in our towns and
cities. Sustainability is about the genes not technological
short-cuts like irrigation or mulching. He stressed the incredible
floral diversity of British gardens and how beneficial this is for
wider bio-diversity. Above all he stressed how the damaging the CBD
has been – how it makes plant hunters into pariahs.

Tony Entwisle from Kew (Director
of Conservation, Living Collections and Estates)was good - and very open-minded, the "sort of man one can do business with" unlike the negative approach that some at Kew and Edinburgh have taken in the past.

9 comments:

The CBD has done everything to criminalize plant collecting and nothing to protect biodiversity or benefit third world countries really. It reminds me of the USA's "War on Drugs" which in fact accomplishes the opposite of what it sets out to do. The Art world has shown what government controls achieved via "Socialist Realism": plant exploration is not a logical vehicle to balance social inequalities between countries. I am delighted that England (where many of these half-cocked ideas originated) is rethinking a tragic course of action.

That is exactly what happened to Verbena bonariensis, it was first collected in Argentina, sent back to Kew to make it double, fatter and taller, and we are now buying it like that from our plant nurseries. I can't say she is not beautiful after the english tratment, though I'm not sure everybody knows this when they are buying this "native" in Buenos Aires.

Its such a wonderful post, thanks for giving the taste of CBD. It is reassuring that people from various disciplines are willing to at least begin this public conversation. Everybody should be more efficient of protecting bio-diversity.

About Me

Garden writer and researcher, lecturer and teacher, based in the England/Wales border region. An occasional designer of plantings for gardens and public spaces.Other interests, and subjects for occasional publication are agriculture, food politics and environmental issues. Chiefly known for promoting naturalistic and sustainable planting design, I am a believer in design and decision-making based on science and evidence – so I have not signed up to organic jihad. And - lot of globe-trotting doesn’t stop me gardening myself either!
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This blog is a place for observations, thoughts and opinions that occur to me as a gardener, horticultural journalist, researcher and commentator on the garden and landscape scene. And sometimes on the food and agriculture scene too.... when, you should be warned, I sometimes express unfashionable thoughts.

PLANT SELECTION: LEARNING FROM NATURE

The first in a series of e-books I'm planning with My Garden School

I'm now doing e-books.

I am now publishing e-books through Amazon, for Kindle, smartphones, iPads etc. There are currently three available, two based on collections of writings for Hortus magazine, from the early 2000s, and one which is an interview with Beth Chatto. Click here for Amazon North America or Amazon UK.

En Francais.

Interview

In February I went to Switzerland to do a lecture for the Swiss Hardy Plant Society (rather quaintly called the Swiss Friends of Perennial Plants). Here is the original English version of an interview he did with me. (you can see German and French above). Merci à Xavier Allemann.